


kiss and cry in the corners of my castle

by unexpectedtrash



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Discrimination, Gen, Harry Potter AU, Hufflepuff Yurio, I will defend these houses to the death, Just kidding they're imaginary characters in imaginary MBTI classifications, Mahoutokoro was a travesty and must be corrected, Ravenclaw Viktor, Slytherin Representation in the DA Please, Yuri's terrible no good very bad teenage crush on Katsuki Yuuri, Yurio is a dear, slytherin yuuri
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-11-13 08:33:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11180994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unexpectedtrash/pseuds/unexpectedtrash
Summary: Yuuri only wanted to go back home to Hasetsu, where the ocean was warm and life was mundane and comfortable.Take it back, he wanted to beg.I never asked for this gift.Magic was a double-edged sword, and with Voldemort advancing, Yuuri wants to turn tail and run.Only, Yuri might have a thing or two to say about that.





	1. Yogurt and Murtlap Essence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reginar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reginar/gifts), [Proserpineceres](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Proserpineceres/gifts).



> As always, this fic is the Rivals' Discord Server's fault. SUPPORT GROUP DOES NOT SUPPORT. Y'ALL FILTHY ENABLERS. 
> 
> Some people might disagree with my sortings. All I'd like to say is that jesus christ, people, the books themselves said that sorting is screwed and inaccurate and is in no way actually representative of the totality of the person. Y'all can chill. If you disagree with these sortings, that doesn't mean you can't enjoy a story. We can disagree and coexist, it's a thing.
> 
> Again, thanks so much to Evermoreriver for being beta for this chapter! You're always so good to me fandom mum i don't deserve u <3 <3 <3
> 
> ALSO! Huge thanks to [ sbuckwheat](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sbuckwheat/pseuds/sbuckwheat) for helping me out with Russian research! I literally just asked her "what foods would yuri's grandfather make him eat to grow taller" and she handed me a food pun all wrapped up in ribbon :joy:

He’s with Beka when it happens in the entrance hall, the stupid pink bitch and her absolutely _sickening_ voice simpering insults at Hagrid, as if he deserved any of her shit just because his mother was giant, like that made him any different. The injustice broils over his skin and his temper flares at the very sight of her, and half-hidden behind the pillars lining the corridor to the dungeons, Yuri is frozen to the spot.

“That fucking bitch,” he hisses, watching Hagrid cower in shame and feeling a sharp twist in his chest at the sight. “This isn’t _fair_ , why isn’t anybody stopping, her, she is goddamn insane –”

“Language, Yura,” Beka says sharply. There are Slytherins around, the fifth years who just came from Flitwick’s classroom, and Yuri shuts his mouth. He’s not stupid enough to mouth off in front of Malfoy. Everyone says that the Hufflepuffs are the dunces of Hogwarts, but they’re not Gryffindors; two years ago, when Yuri first arrived at Hogwarts and had gotten pushed around for being tiny, girly, and Russian, Beka found out and showed him the ropes.

People think Hufflepuffs are peacemakers, but it’s better to stay out of fights and not piss anyone off. _Your space, their space, you understand?_ Beka had said, jabbing at the Slytherin table across the Great Hall. _Corridors, hallways, empty classrooms, those are their spaces because they aren’t ours. Be at home at the common room, but public places call for a public face_.

Yuri’s only been here two years, and sometimes he still feels like he’s back home in Moscow and can run out to the street in front of Deda’s house buck-ass naked and screaming at the top of his lungs. Things are different here, and Yuri still needs the reminder.

Draco Malfoy is swaggering through the halls like he owns the place, the Inquistorial Squad badge glinting on his chest like some sort of medal. Yuri shuts his mouth and shuts it fast.

Someone else doesn’t.

“It’s a little disheartening to see one of the school’s highest officials behave like this to the teachers. It seems like maintaining the faculty’s face and honour isn’t important to the school board at all.”

A quiet voice pierces through the silent entrance hall and Yuri fucking jerks, because is that Yuuri Katsuki? Yuuri Katsuki, the Slytherin Seeker who flies like hell but wilts like a wallflower every time Snape passes by, who has no friends, who’s rumoured to be mute because no one has ever heard him talk?

Yuri spots him at the foot of the staircase, his back turned to Yuri. The last time Yuri saw him up close was right before the Gryffindor – Slytherin Quidditch match, and even then, Katsuki was curling in on himself like he wanted to make himself look smaller. Now, though, the line of his shoulders is straight, spine steel and proud. Yuri grabs Beka’s arm and shoves his way through the crowd to get a better look.

The look on Umbridge’s face is hilarious; her eyes are bugging out in disbelief and she can barely stutter out a reply. “Excuse me, Mr. Katsuki?”

She mispronounces his name, accent drawing out the _u_ sound, and Yuri is thirteen, and can only speak Russian and English but even he caught the way Katsuki suppressed the _u_ when he introduced himself at the game. She probably didn’t even bother to get it right; God knows she’s murdered his own name enough times during class for any effort now to be believable.

“Did you say something?”

He and Beka had circled the Entrance Hall, so he gets a good look of Katsuki’s blank face and icy eyes when he replies. “Just a minor observation on the academic customs here in the Great Britain, Professor. I don’t think I would have ever seen such an interaction between my teachers in Japan, where behaviour in an academic setting is much more, ah, regulated.”

Forget his spine; Katsuki’s balls are made of steel.

Umbridge’s mouth had fallen open, and she spits at Katsuki like an angry cat. “I have never been treated with greater disrespect.” Her face is turning an unattractive shade of purple, and ew, gross really, Yuri didn’t think she could get uglier.

“I am the High Inquistor for this institution and I will _not_ tolerate such disrespectful behaviour from a student who is only here by the benevolent assistance of the Ministry of Magic, in which, you will know, I occupy a position of considerable influence. You will see me for detention every night for the next month for this offense, young man, until I deem you to have learned a lesson about proper English courtesy.”

Yuri’s blood runs cold, and he feels Beka tense beside him. Hufflepuffs don’t get as much detention as the rest of the houses (see: your space, their space), but the handful of housemates who’ve gotten detentions with Umbridge inevitably came back bleeding and in tears. “It’s a blood quill,” Zacharias Smith had said grimly, and Yuri hadn’t known why it was such a big deal until he’d forced it out of Beka.

“It’s a cursed quill,” he had said, his discomfort making him talk more curtly than usual. “It uses your blood when you write with it. Moody said it’s been illegal for at least a century.”

Yuri can barely suppress a shudder at the thought, but Katsuki looks unfazed. “I apologize if I offended you, Professor,” he says stiffly, and holy shit, he actually _bows_ to Umbridge, one of those formal Japanese bows Yuri’s seen in like, samurai movies. The sarcasm in every line of Katsuki’s body could make him cry; this is one of those times Yuri is going to remember forever because nothing makes him feel better than his enemies getting humiliated.

Later, in the Hufflepuff common room, Yuri crows about the whole thing to an enthralled audience of first years, and Beka bumps his shoulder in solidarity. His face is as deadpan as always, but when Yuri stops to draw breath, he interrupts. “She can’t be your nemesis, she’s the Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic and you’re thirteen.”

“Shut up, Beka,” Yuri groans.

* * *

The school is buzzing with the news the next day, and at breakfast that morning, all eyes are on the edge of the Slytherin table, waiting for Katsuki to take his seat at the very end and eat his breakfast. It’s near the same spot where Yuri and Beka eat theirs, so Yuri’s used to seeing Katsuki eat. He gets special food from the kitchens, strange Japanese food that looks terrible, but he seems to really enjoy it when it’s there. Yuri would complain, but sometimes for lunch there’d be pirozhki or pelmeni so he doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to special treatment.

“Let me guess,” Beka says when Yuri all but drags him out of bed at the fourth years’ dorm rooms. “You’re excited to see Katsuki.”

“What the fuck, Beka, I’m only excited to see Umbridge’s defeated ugly face,” Yuri snaps and throws a set of robes at Beka. “Shoes, shirt, let’s get out of here and laugh at Umbitch’s face.”

Beka huffs out a laugh but heads to the bathroom to get changed anyway. Yuri dodges the pillow Crawley hurled in his direction and hollered after him: “You’ve got five minutes before I leave your sorry ass behind, Altin!”

They make it out of the dorm in five, and when they get to the Great Hall, it’s still mostly empty. There’s a few professors already up at the high table; Professor Sprout looks quietly furious but still smiles in their direction when they come in. Professor McGonagall looks displeased, lips pursed in distaste, and yeah, Yuri can relate. Poor lady has to sit right next to Umbridge all the time and –

Wait.

Umbridge is stirring sugar into her tea, face smug and looking too fucking happy this early in the morning. She’s got a stack of scones in front of her, a pot of jam that’s clearly hers because it is infuriatingly pink, and there are like, ten bows clipped to various parts of her anatomy and Yuri really wants to hurl now.

Katsuki is nowhere to be seen.

Yuri forces Beka to wait with him until their first class, but Katsuki never shows up for breakfast.

* * *

“I just don’t understand it,” Yuri says, frustrated, to Beka. Beka is lying on the grass three feet away and is deeply engrossed in homework for Arithmancy; Yuri had peeked at what Otabek was doing and decided he wants nothing to do with numbers, whether they were magical or not. “The way he totally _wrecked_ her yesterday should mean that he’s the Chosen One! Prophesised to end this tyranny!”

“Isn’t that Potter?” Otabek asks, flipping a page in his charts.

“Fuck Potter, man,” Yuri grouses. “I mean, he’s nice enough, but he’s lazy on the pitch. He’s damned fast and he’s got good reflexes, but he’s fucking coasting and honestly that’s insulting.”

Beka only raises an eyebrow. “He’s got more important things to think of than Quidditch,” he says diplomatically. His quill scratches runes onto his parchment, and Yuri pulls up patches of grass to tear apart while sorting through his thoughts on Katsuki. Third year homework is boring.

They’d picked out a tree close to the Forbidden Forest than the lake, not far off from Hagrid’s hut. Yuri’s not close to Hagrid or anything but getting yelled at in front of your students has got to be rough, and there were pirozhki at the Hufflepuff table for lunch today. Hagrid had cried when Yuri brought it over, and it was weird. At least he’d managed to dodge Hagrid’s hug, because: fuck no. Hagrid is a half-giant and Yuri barely five feet tall.

Beka picked out a tree that’s within sight of the Whomping Willow, because he’s a nerd and genuinely likes Herbology. They’d done this the year before too. The third years got assigned to watch the Whomping Willow for “botanical drawings” and Beka just decided that watching it was soothing and so it became a regular thing.

He watches the branches now, lazily swatting at the few birds that dared to try and land on the tree. “Whatever,” he says, already forgetting about Harry Potter. Potter is old news, he’d heard about him when he was in Russia, for god’s sake. Katsuki standing up to Umbridge in front of half the school, however –

“What do you think made him do it?” He asks Beka suddenly. Beka looks up with interest, and Yuri clarifies. “Katsuki, I meant. Why do you think he did what he did?”

“Isn’t preventing injustice enough?” Beka asks wryly. He closes his book and sets it aside, and Yuri feels oddly gratified that he’s giving the conversation his full attention.

“He’s a Slytherin; Slytherins don’t do anything for nothing,” Yuri points out instead of addressing the warmth in his chest. “Cunning selfish bastards, right?”

Beka hums. “Not all of them, and not all the time. No one can keep up the ‘think only of yourself’ game for too long, they’d get exhausted eventually.”

“Yeah, but he goes from ‘the person whose voice is a mystery’ to ‘casually burning professors in the entrance hall’. It’s a bit of a leap.”

“Maybe he keeps it for the people who know him well.” Beka picks up his book again and Yuri tries not to feel disappointed. He’s clearly done talking about Katsuki; Yuri knows better than to push for any more now. He digs through his school bag for his star charts; might as well get started on some homework too.

They work quietly together, Yuri sometimes asking Otabek questions for reference and Otabek… well, he doesn’t exactly say anything. He just lets Yuri fill in the silence with occasional chatter and offers a careful response when prompted, and that suits Yuri just fine.

The quiet is a blessing, because half an hour after conversation died out, Yuri hears an incoming broomstick.

Whoever it is, they’re fucking crazy because they fly into the tree line of the Forbidden Forest at breakneck speed, only barely dodging the branches on the one Beka and Yuri had claimed for themselves. The broom disappears into the forest, and Yuri’s heart hasn’t even stopped racing when it breaks through the canopy and zooms back in their direction.

It just cements his crazy further; Yuri glimpses a Hogwarts uniform when Broom skirts too close to the Whomping Willow and the tree comes to life, furious at the invasion of its territory. Instead of backing away like a fucking _normal_ person, Broom actually flies through the branches, and holy shit, that’s beautiful flying.

Yuri’s jaw drops. His brain is on a feedback loop: _This is fucking awesome, this is fucking awesome, this is fucking_ – Watching the stranger weave through the Whomping Willow’s branches with obvious ease, slipping through the twigs like silk through your fingers – Yuri no longer cares who it is, he wants to marry this person, or maybe force him to give up his flying secrets at knife point because has he said _holy shit_.

Even Beka had perked up beside him, watching the Broom with rapt attention. His turns are clean and sharp, like the broom responds to his every thought, his seat on the broomstick practically perfect. Whoever he is, he could go professional, easy – even Harry Potter doesn’t fly with this kind of precision.

After five minutes of furious hide-and-seek with the Whomping Willow, and also five minutes of Yuri Plisetsky quietly having what he will in the future know as his Gay Epiphany, Broom flies out of the Willow’s range and stills in the air.

It’s Yuuri fucking Katsuki, because of course.

He and Beka sit there, dumbfounded, and Katsuki casually takes a water bottle from his pocket and surveys the Whomping Willow with that quietly sad expression he’s got permanently etched on his face when he isn’t being a brick wall. He’s broken out into a light sweat, and in the weak spring sunshine he’s? Glowing? Yuri has no idea what’s going on anymore, Katsuki’s face is attractively flushed and Yuri feels something take control of his mouth.

“Oi, Katsuki!” He hollers, and when Katsuki’s attention snaps to him, Yuri wants to die.

It’s weird to be on the receiving end of Katsuki’s stare; Yuri’s already noticed the intense tunnel vision he gets right before every game. He’s the only Seeker worth watching during the Hogwarts Quidditch season. Potter coasts on his natural talent and his Firebolt, and anyway since he’s gone and fucked up with Umbridge, Ginny Weasley is playing Seeker for Gryffindor. Everyone knows watching Chang play is a disappointment, because she’s not Viktor and Viktor is disqualified from playing on the school team. In any case, Yuri’s spent years watching Viktor fly circles around him, and there are literally radio broadcasts dedicated to mooning over Viktor’s flying technique, so like he said about Potter: old news.

Yuri can feel his face heat up under the weight of that stare, and he fumbles for something to say. “Why the fuck don’t you fly like that in competition, asshole?”

Did he just call Katsuki an asshole? Yuri hears Beka groaning beside him and turns even redder.

Katsuki looks taken aback, and of course he does. Some third year punk just called him an asshole while he was out flying on his own, of course he’s surprised. He blinks at Yuri, and flies closer.

“I’m sorry, I can’t quite make out your face. Do I know you?” A second later and Katsuki is right in front of his face, and Yuri makes an _eep_ noise that he desperately tries to stifle. Close-up, he can see each individual eyelash that frames Katsuki’s eyes, and wow, his skin is so clear, no wonder Susan Bones put him on the list of Cutest Boys in Hogwarts, he is literally too pretty for this world –

 _He’s too close_ , his brain tells him in panic, and he automatically shoves Katsuki off his broom. Katsuki actually tumbles over like a wimp, instead of the beast on a broomstick Yuri had been watching just seconds ago.

He lands in a tangle of robes and limbs, and the bandage on his right hand doesn’t escape Yuri’s notice. “I didn’t mean to get so close, I’m so sorry, I won’t do it again,” Katsuki babbles, struggling to get to his feet. Beka wordlessly catches his broomstick before it flies off, and also helps haul Katsuki to his feet. He manages to glare at Yuri while he does so, and Yuri shoots him a panicked look as Katsuki is dusting his ass off.

“It’s just that I’m not wearing my glasses, and I couldn’t see you very clearly.” Katsuki straightens up, and squints at Yuri. “Uh, Yuri Plisetsky?”      

“Yeah,” Yuri stammers. Of course Katsuki knows his name, he’s the Seeker for the Hufflepuff Team, he’s competition.

“I didn’t hear your question very clearly, I was so far away. What did you want to know?”

“Yes, Yura, what were you saying right before you called him an asshole?” Beka is an awful friend, he’s getting fired, Yuri hates him now and he can go fuck off to a ditch and die.

But Deda didn’t raise any cowards; Yuri girds his loins and looks Katsuki in the eye. “I asked you why you don’t fly like that in competition, Katsuki. If you flew like that all the time in Quidditch, you’d outfly Potter every time.”

“Oh!” Katsuki flushes darker. When he blushes, the red flush stains across his nose, to his ears, and spreads even further out. “I was just trying to clear my head… it’s not really a big deal? Anyway Graham is pretty strict with our plays, and I might play Seeker but playing as a team is very important to our captain –”

“Fuck Montague,” Yuri interrupts. “He’s an idiot and he makes idiot plays; why do you even bother listening to him? He’s got shit for brains and his plays are just thinly-veiled cheating–”

Yuri stops when Beka jabs his elbow into his side; Katsuki’s face shutters at the insult to Graham Montague. “I’ll thank you to stop insulting my captain, Plisetsky. I thought the Hufflepuff team had a better understanding of teamwork than that, but I shouldn’t have expected anything else from a Seeker who lost his temper on the pitch so badly Ginny Weasley caught the Snitch right in front of his face.”

Katsuki stuffs his water bottle back into his pocket and withdraws his glasses. “I’m sorry for disturbing your afternoon, Altin,” he says stiffly, nodding to Beka. He manages a curt “Plisetsky” and a nod in Yuri’s direction before flying off to the castle.

“What the fuck just happened?” Yuri wonders out loud.

Beka settles back into the grass, picks up his book, and replies. “You’re terrible at having crushes, Yura.”

* * *

It’s late when Yuri finally leaves the Quidditch pitch and heads back to the Hufflepuff common room. It’s beyond curfew by now, but after a disastrous practice session, Katsuki’s words still hanging in the air, Zacharias finally lost his shit at Yuri and made him clean the whole team’s gear.

“You’re part of a team, Plisetsky!” He had yelled impatiently. “You might be a Seeker, but you don’t work this game alone.”

The rest of the team left their equipment in a large pile at the changing rooms, and Zacharias pointed at the way the team pile towered over the small bundle of Yuri’s gear. “That’s the rest of us, and that’s you. In the end, you’re just a tiny part of this game, Yuri.”

Beka was the last to leave. “You deserve it,” he explained when Yuri opened his mouth to complain. “Your pride is costing us games. Get your head out of your ass.”

Beka didn’t swear very often.

In the end, it takes him three hours to finish cleaning all the gear, and it’s only sheer luck that he managed to sneak into the castle without Filch noticing. Mrs. Norris had seen him, but she and Yuri have an arrangement. Scraps and petting on demand for her silence, and as he sneaks through the entrance hall and down to the dungeons with those green, feline eyes watching his every move, he knows that this time it was going to take a major treat to satisfy Mrs. Norris.

He’s incredibly relieved to make it to the dungeons. Filch hardly ever patrols here, and Snape mostly keeps to the corridors near the Slytherin common room. Still, Yuri knows better than to relax, and in the dim fire light, he sticks to the shadows, ready to duck behind a pillar or into one of the alcoves carved into the stone walls.

He’s not even halfway to the Hufflepuff common room when he hears it: a sharp intake of breath that sends him diving behind a pillar. There’s someone down the hall.

Whoever it is, it isn’t Filch or Snape, that much is clear. Yuri can hear stifled sobbing, the soft hiccupping of someone who’s been crying for a while, and the sound of that breathing, heavily distressed, sends Yuri out to help in alarm.

“Hey, who’s there?” He calls out sharply. He skids down the corridor, still careful not to make enough noise to send Snape investigating. It might be some idiot first year who’d gotten lost in the creepy dungeons again, or some girl crying about a boy or something but –

Of all the possibilities that were running through his mind, none of them was 'Yuuri Katsuki having a panic attack and trying to stop his hand from bleeding.'

“What the actual fuck?” Yuri hisses. Katsuki looks up in alarm, and shit, he’s crying so hard he can barely even talk.

“P-Plisetsky?” Katsuki gasps. “I – I uh, I didn’t hear you –” He tries to rub at his eyes and wipe away his tears, but he uses the back of his right hand and only succeeds in smearing blood across his face. “Ah, _kuso_ –”

Yuri grabs Katsuki’s hand before he does more damage to himself. “Detention with Umbridge?” He asks sharply. He blots away the blood with his school tie, and the words leap out at him, angrily red and damning: _I will not forget my place_. “That fucking bitch,” Yuri breathes at the sight.

Katsuki is struggling to get his breathing back under control, but manages to get a few words out. “If you have some bandages with you, Plisetsky, I can take care of this myself, I don’t want you to get caught out of bed –”

“Fuck that, you’re coming with me,” Yuri snaps. He whips off his tie and ties it around Katsuki’s hand. “You don’t know how to deal with the Blood Quill, don’t you?” He gestures at the pile of bloodstained handkerchiefs and bandages beside Katsuki. “It’s cursed; you can’t just wait for it to clot over on its own. Hufflepuff prefects have been sending people to the kitchens to ask for murtlap essence. Has anyone in Slytherin gotten detention from Umbridge yet?”

Katsuki is still shaking; he shakes his head and gets out a watery “No?” in between breaths. “At least not like this. I asked Marcus about his detentions with her and he only had to do lines. Not… this?” He’s pale and shaky on his feet, so Yuri shores him up with his own shoulder, snags Katsuki’s book bag from the stone floor.

Katsuki isn’t very heavy; he’s built slight and fast like most Seekers. But he’s taller than Yuri, and also having a panic attack, and it’s a long walk to the kitchens. So Yuri pulls out his wand, thanks God that the DA was doing Disillusionment Charms that week, and raps the tip sharply on top of Katsuki’s head.

He knows what it feels like (like a raw egg was cracked on top of your head, it’s so gross), so he’s prepared for the way that Katsuki yelps in surprise. “Shh,” he hisses. “We’re going to have to hide a bit until we get to the kitchens, and then you can come with me to the Hufflepuff common room so you don’t get caught out at curfew. Alright?” He glares at Katsuki, and the wall-patterned blob beside him nods.

“Good.” Yuri twirls his wand around himself, and grasps Katsuki’s left wrist. “Follow me.”

The kitchens are always busy no matter what time it is, and this late into the evening the elves are mostly just washing up after dinner service. But at the sight of Yuri and Katsuki, they zoom into action; a table is laid out, hot tea with milk – “And a dash of something strong from Professor Trelawney’s cupboard, young sir,” Slinky adds in an undertone – and a bowl of murtlap essence set in front of Katsuki.

“Put your hand in it,” Yuri encouraged. Yuri gets an apple pirozhki and a cup of Rastishka for his trouble.

Deda had put a whole bunch of it in his trunk when he was packing for his first year in Hogwarts, a little joke between Yuri and his grandfather. “You are a tiny boy, Yurachka, and this Rastishka will help you grow taller!” It was more than a little annoying back then, especially since Viktor had laughed himself sick at the sight. But during his first weeks in Hogwarts, when he not very good at English and being bullied for his accent, the Rastishka was a comforting shred of home in a foreign castle, with its defiantly Muggle plastic packaging and neon-green dinosaur on the lids.

His first encounter with a house elf was when he was eleven, in front of the fireplace at the Hufflepuff common room at midnight and surrounded by empty yogurt cups, crying himself sick with missing home. Slinky found him there, and all he got from Yuri was that there was no more Rastishka, his Deda would be furious that there wasn’t any more left, and how was he going to get taller without the Rastishka he _needed_ it to grow, Deda said so.

Three years later, the house elves are still convinced that it’s a mass-produced Russian growth-enhancing potion that Yuri is medically required to take in order to get taller, and nothing he says or does can make them stop Apparating to Russia to buy it for him.

Yuri is thanking the elves when he catches Katsuki staring at him. “What are you looking at?” He demands. “Never seen someone being fucking polite to house elves before?”

Katsuki’s eyes are wide behind his glasses. He’s calmed down a lot since he shoved his hand in the murtlap essence, but his eyes are still puffy and read and his breathing has yet to even out completely. “Um. Is that Muggle pre-packaged yogurt?”

Yuri’s surprised. “You know Russian and Muggle brands of yogurt?”

“Ah, no.” Katsuki hesitates, and then admits: “It was the plastic packaging. I’ve never seen anything magical come in a plastic container.”

Yuri is about to retort that screw you, Rastishka is magical, until the implications of what Katsuki said sinks in. “Wait, you know about plastic?”

Most purebloods don’t know a thing about plastic, and the more culturally isolated purebloods actively dislike it. Beka, for all that he and his family are what passes for liberal in the pureblood communities, grew up in the countryside of Kazakhstan entirely surrounded by magic, in a mansion two centuries steeped in magic and travelling exclusively by magical means.

“It’s a little difficult to explain,” Beka had told Yuri once, eyeing one of the disposable Rastishka cups with distaste. “It feels a little strange? Hollow is not quite the word for it, but it doesn’t feel quite real.”

To see a Slytherin casually dropping that information was so far out of the realm of possibility that Yuri is stunned into silence. Yuri knows for a fact that none of the fifth year Slytherins are in Muggle Studies; one of his first formative memories of Hogwarts is the memory of Susan Bones storming into the Hufflepuff common room in his very first year here, incandescent with rage that not a single Slytherin in her year even bothered to enlist in Muggle Studies. But Katsuki is sitting right across of Yuri, and Yuri realizes with a jolt that Katsuki’s glasses are blue plastic, and that the watch on his wrist is a plastic Casio.

“Are you...” Yuri says slowly. “Are you a Muggle-born?”

Katsuki pales at his words.

“You are!” Yuri accuses him, the disbelief obvious in his voice. “How the hell did you end up in Slytherin?”

At the question, something sours in Katsuki’s expression; his lips curl into a sneer and he scoffs. “Like that’s not a question I get every day from Malfoy. As if Muggle-borns can’t be cunning or ambitious, like we’re not _allowed_ to want things –” and here Katsuki’s voice turns caustic, “—beyond ‘our place’.”

This Katsuki is such a huge departure from the weeping, shuddering mess Yuri had found in the shadowy corners of the dungeon corridors. For a second Yuri sees the same guy who mouthed off at Umbridge just two days ago – but all of a sudden it seems like Katsuki snaps back to himself. His mouth goes slack with surprise and Katsuki’s good hand flies up to his face. “I’m sorry!” He squeaks. “I – I shouldn’t have taken that out on you, you were only trying to help.”

He looks more than a little chagrined, and also a little panicked. He never really calmed down from the panic attack, and it looks like it’s coming back. Katsuki goes pale, his entire body tenses in his chair, and even the bleeding hand submerged in murtlap essence clenches into a fist.

This must be something he doesn’t share with anyone else in school, Yuri realizes. Most of the time, people know who’s a Muggle-born, because Muggle-borns act like Muggles and talk like Muggles, and especially if you were British, it was easy to tell. It took longer to guess at Yuri’s own Muggle background. His mother and Deda are Muggles, and seeing as he spent the first ten years of his life with no clue that his father was a wizard, Yuri grew up Muggle. But it was harder to notice it with him, because everyone (including Yuri himself) thought that any cultural differences were because he was Russian. He had thought the same of Katsuki, who everyone knew came from Japan.

Most Muggle-borns out themselves as a matter of course. Yuri doesn’t even have to wonder why Katsuki hid his Muggle heritage. It’s obvious: he lives in the same dormitory as Draco Malfoy.

“Hey,” he says, a little roughly. “I’m not telling anyone, okay? I was just surprised, that was all.” Katsuki blinks and Yuri immediately looks down to the table, fiddling with his spoon and then shoving an extra-large spoonful of yogurt into his face to avoid talking.

“I…” Katsuki clears his throat. “I would really appreciate it if you keep that between us.”

Yuri shrugs as he tries to force the yogurt down. “I, uh. I sort of guessed. You live with that asshat Malfoy, makes sense if you don’t want people to know. Does he –?”

Katsuki barks out a bitter laugh. “God, no. Can you even imagine it? He hates me enough for being foreign and for kicking him off the Quidditch team. What do you think he’d even say if he found out?”

He goes quiet, starts running a finger along the rim of his teacup. “I wasn’t even supposed to go to Hogwarts, you know? In Japan, wizarding children start school at Mahoutokoro at seven, and when I turned seven, someone from the Ministry of Magical Affairs came to tell my parents that I’m a wizard.” He looks up at Yuri. “Do you know anything about the Japanese magical society?”

Yuri shook his head. Katsuki laughs quietly.

“There’s a reason for that. I read up on it, you see – Muggle Japan opened up alright to the outside world under the Meiji government. Magical Japan, not so much.” He drains his teacup, and Slinky, who was waiting by his elbow, whisks it away and replaces it with a fresh cup.

“Mahoutokoro is on an island. People outside Japan call it a school but really, it’s more like a monastery. Very few wizards go there for school; most people learn their magic from their families, magical lessons passed down from generation to generation, because everything in Japan is like that: filial, passed on from father to son and jealously guarded within the family.

“But for people like me…” Katsuki’s eyes drop down to his lap. “My parents own an onsen. Our family has had this onsen for generations. But…” He sighs. “It’s just an onsen. And for Muggle-borns, Mahoutokoro is the only option.”

“Did you go?” Yuri asks.

“For a few years, yeah.”

“Why’d you leave?”

Katsuki shrugged helplessly. “They asked me to stay. They told me and my parents that if I stayed on after my eleventh birthday, I would have to bind myself to the monastery and become a monk for the rest of my life. They would have never seen me again. The monks would have erased all their memories of me. Just like that, gone forever.”

“So you came here?”

“Yeah. Everyone said that Wizarding Britain was very liberal about Muggle-borns; then the first thing I see on the train was Draco Malfoy calling Hermione Granger a Mudblood.”

Yuri winced. “It’s worse in Russia,” he admitted.

“Isn’t that why Viktor Nikiforov left Durmstrang?” Katsuki’s eyes are shining again, this time with curiosity. “And if you’re Muggle-born too, is that why you didn’t go there either?”

“I’m not Muggle-born,” Yuri explained. “I’m a half-blood. Still dirty blood to them, but passable enough that they would have taken me and I wouldn’t have had to learn English.” He rolls his eyes at Yuuri, who chuckles in empathy.

“But that’s not the reason why I didn’t go.” This isn’t something he’s told anyone beyond Beka. But Hufflepuffs trade in honesty and fairness: vulnerability demands vulnerability, and trust goes both ways.

“My mom – she was a Muggle, yeah? She meets this guy, they do it, she gets pregnant, he leaves. It turns out he was a wizard all along, and I only found out when I was ten and he was rampaging across Moscow calling my mom a liar, and that I wasn’t his kid.”

Yuri scowls at the memory. “Turns out he was an enormous jackass; blood purist, Dark wizard, filthy rich but that only made him more of an ass. I don’t know what he came to Moscow for, but if it hadn’t been for Viktor –”

“Viktor?”

Yuri bites his lip and admits it. “Viktor is my half-brother. The douchebag’s son from his real marriage, apparently.” He pauses, because it’s not his story to tell. “You’ll have to ask him about the details, but long story short, he broke it off with our dad and brought me to Hogwarts with him when he left Durmstrang.”  

“Oh.” Katsuki seemed at a loss for words, and instead of saying anything in reply, he just chugs another mug of tea. A glass of milk had materialized in front of Yuri too; he chugs that down gratefully.

“You’re not a bad listener, Katsuki,” Yuri allows after draining his glass, wiping the milk moustache off with the back of his hand.

“You’re not bad yourself, Plisetsky.” When Katsuki smiles, it extends from his mouth and up into his eyes, which are a plain brown in regular lighting but fiery gold in the firelight. Yuri is thirteen and in the future he will remember this moment as Gay Epiphany #2.

“You should just call me Yura,” he stammers.

Katsuki’s smile is incredibly soft, and Yuri forgets that he found Katsuki nearly bleeding out in the middle of a dark corridor. “In that case, you should just call me Yuuri.”


	2. Flitterblooms and Flybys

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hufflepuff vs. Slytherin. The aftermath.

It’s a week before the Hufflepuff - Slytherin Quidditch match, and Zacharias has the Hufflepuff team gathered in the common room before breakfast. The meeting had been set before seven in the morning, so obviously Beka had to drag Yuri out of bed, ripping the warm quilt away from Yuri’s sleepy embrace with the heartlessness of the truly demented.

He stifles a yawn now, still sleepy even after Beka had shoved him into the showers, and settles into his armchair to wait for the others. An enormous Flitterbloom tentacle reaches down to ruffle his hair, and Yuri isn’t quite awake enough to suppress the little happy noise he makes. Fuck it. This Flitterbloom is the absolute _best_ , it has centuries of experience in patting people’s heads, and if Summerby snickers again he can go fuck himself up the ass with the Elder Wand.

Macavoy arrives just in time to hear hear him blurt that out. “Yuri, that’s a horrible thing to say!” she cries in outrage, and Yuri just about snaps himself awake to yell back when she steamrollers on. “You’ll want something a bit bigger than the Elder Wand, because Jim is being a giant ass.”

Heidi Macavoy: Chaser, badass, has hair that is objectively nearly as good as Viktor Nikiforov’s. Yuri approves.

The team had long ago laid claim to this table underneath the ancient Flitterbloom, its great stone pot suspended from the low ceiling and covered all over with the names of Hufflepuff Quidditch captains of the past. For centuries, the Hufflepuff Quidditch team have met here, decided on plays here, and mourned loss after loss under this very same plant. It’s an institution, a tradition – every captain carves the previous captain’s name into the stone when their tenure is over.

The last name on the list is _Cedric Diggory_.

The night Yuri was sorted, he still wasn’t very good at English. His mother had just died (non-douchebag related; she got sick), he and his Deda had just been spirited away to St. Petersburg by a stranger who claimed to be his brother, and then suddenly, he wasn’t even in Russia anymore and was in _Scotland_. He’d barely come to grips with the thought that he was a wizard and he was being forced to study English, forced to study in a boarding school far away from home.

It took all of his strength not to cry when he sat in front of a whole school murmuring about him in a language he didn’t understand. He was supposed to be strong! A brave, fearless Russian boy, but his traitor heart was begging the Sorting Hat: _Please, I just want to go home_.

It was magic when it whispered back, in flawless Russian. “I can’t send you back home to your Deda, I’m afraid.” It sounded sad and apologetic, gentler than Yuri thought a shrivelled magical hat would sound like. “I can, however, put you in –”

“Hufflepuffs, with me!” Yuri almost hadn’t heard Cedric calling for the first years after the feast, his vision swimming in tears as he watched Viktor be swallowed up by a mass of blue across the Hall. He’d felt so small, so alone, eating his dinner quietly and barely following any of the conversations around him. When the whole table suddenly stood up to leave the Great Hall he hadn’t known what to do, sure that the whole house was just going to leave him behind.

But one tiny, blond, crying foreign first-year had still been  worth something to Cedric, because he doubled back for Yuri, knelt in front of him and remembered his name.

“Plisetsky, right? Yuri?” He had asked. McGonagall had badly mangled his name at the roll; later he would find out that McGonagall’s English is accented even to some native speakers and he will feel slightly better for it. But hearing his name, the stress wrong but the vowels right, had drawn him out of his panic, and when Yuri’s eyes focused on Cedric’s, Cedric had smiled at him: warm, welcoming, and kind.

“Плисецкий,” Yuri corrected shyly. Cedric laughed and repeated it, slow around the syllables but better than before. Yuri giggled at his pronunciation, fear momentarily forgotten.

“You’ll tell me if I get it wrong, will you?” he asked warmly. He straightened up and held out a hand to Yuri. “My name’s Cedric,” he said, sure to keep his words slow and clear. “I’m a prefect, and I can show you the Hufflepuff dormitories. Let’s get out of here?”

Cedric had done so much for Yuri. He consulted with Professor Sprout about Yuri’s English proficiency (technically good but practically bad; he could read and write but couldn’t follow the quick conversation around him). Cedric had personally made sure that Yuri was settling in well, and when it looked like Yuri wasn’t making friends with the other Hufflepuff kids in his year, Cedric had sent Otabek to where Yuri was sulking in a sunspot, buried under five kilograms of fluffy Potya.

Otabek had marched up to Yuri like a soldier gearing up for battle, and Yuri had eyed him with the utmost suspicion. Even Potya had tensed, somehow fluffing himself up to a bigger volume. They stared at each other for a while, an intense standoff while sizing each other up, broken only by Otabek’s flat voice:

“So, you like cats?”

It was a stupid question. But it wasn’t, because Otabek had asked him if he liked cats in _Russian_.

Cedric had done so much for Yuri – but he did it for everyone, and he did it with a smile and with the absolute selflessness of someone who truly wanted to help. So, in June last year, when Harry Potter stumbled out of the maze –

Right after the Welcoming Feast last September, the entirety of Hufflepuff House stood sentinel in silence as Zacharias Smith carved Cedric’s name into stone with rough, uncoordinated hands, tears streaming down his face.

Yuri looks up at the pot now, looks at the centuries of neat names and then Zacharias’ messy carving. Now that he’s awake and faced with their last chance to at winning the Cup for Cedric, the previous match is a ball of hot humiliation in his chest. The fury, he remembers – the boos, the absolute shit the Gryffindor team had been reduced to because of Umbridge’s witch hunt when they started out as an absolute dream, fucking _Weasley is our King_ – Yuri remembers his hands shaking on his broom, remembers turning towards Malfoy’s face, half-desperate to punch him in his perfect teeth, remembers Ginny Weasley snatching the Snitch five inches away from his own nose.

He grabs a cushion and hugs it tight; he’s frankly surprised it doesn’t burst from the pressure. Beka wrestles it out of his grip and replaces it with Potya instead. The cat yowls but accepts the hug; Potya has always been the best, a champ, the greatest companion, and Yuri doesn’t for a moment regret the fact that he named him Puma Tiger Scorpion. He deserves such a badass name.

Zacharias walks in with Maxine O’Flaherty and Tony Rickett, all three laden with trays from the kitchens. The Hufflepuff team didn’t monitor player diet – he knows that Roger Davies has a nutritional plan for the Ravenclaws, but judging from Viktor’s casual dismissal of the program, Yuri knows it’s basically useless. Instead, Zacharias prefers to keep the team out of the Great Hall during the week leading up to a match, to keep them out of all the alpha male pissing contests the Slytherin team likes to have.

“Montague relies on 90% intimidation and 10% Katsuki Yuuri.” Zacharias starts with the obvious, settling into his chair and unwrapping a turkey sandwich. “They’ve also got speed on us as a whole team – they’ve all got Nimbus 2001s, so it’s no use trying to win any races against them.”

The only broom the Hufflepuff team has that can match the Nimbus 2001 is Yuri’s. Even if it’s just a hand-me-down from Viktor, it’s still a professional-grade racing broom, a Sokolinyy Razboynik that was custom-fitted for Viktor at fifteen. He had the same build as Yuri himself then, short and slight, a good build for speed but with the consequence of a marked difficulty in controlling the fastest brooms, especially in inclement weather. It’s a magnificent broom for Yuri, who shares those same problems, and it’s the best broom in Hogwarts aside from Harry Potter’s Firebolt.

It seems like Yuri’s going to have to pull extra weight on the pitch for this match, and Zacharias confirms it. “Maxine and I thought of a good strategy, but Yuri’s going to have to do double the work. You up for it?”

The whole team’s gaze swivels to Yuri, curled up on an armchair and rubbing his cheek on Potya’s fur.

Yuri sets the cat down onto the floor, and Potya pads away on lightning-quick feet. Yuri watches him go, and turns back to his team, shoulders resolute and with the eyes of a soldier who knows that the upcoming war will be a difficult one. “What do you need?”

* * *

In just three years from now, Lee Jordan will begin broadcasting a guerrilla radio show called _Potterwatch!_ , and thousands of people will listen to his voice, full of forced cheer, undisguised indignation, and suppressed grief. His voice will be the only truth on the airwaves, and he will be one of the most wanted men in Britain until Voldemort is defeated. Kingsley Shacklebolt will give him an Order of Merlin, First Class. George Weasley will receive two.

Yuri will be fifteen and in France, stashed away in Beauxbatons and struggling with a new medium of instruction. It’s Latin, this time – the students in Beauxbatons speak all of the Romance languages and rejected French as a _lingua franca_ a millennium ago. Otabek Altin will be sixteen and struggling through the same.

In Marseilles, they will be safe. Life in France will be easy and smooth, while across the channel a brutal war will be fought in the streets of London, in the Forest of Dean, on the grounds of Hogwarts. They will be safe in Marseilles and they will not need to listen to _Potterwatch!_ to stay alive.

They are foreigners in Britain, the two of them – but Neville Longbottom will give Otabek the cutting of Venomous Tentacula that will make its home in the Altins’ greenhouse all the way in Kazakhstan. Susan Bones had once spent six months teaching Yuri correct vowel pronunciations so his spells stopped backfiring. In three years her whole family will be dead.

They will listen to _Potterwatch!_ anyway.

But Yuri is still thirteen now, and at this moment, there is only one thing that he wants to do. He clenches his thighs around his broom, shaking in anticipation, and he listens close: Lee Jordan’s voice is booming across the Quidditch pitch.

“And now we have the players from Hufflepuff! The Chasers, led by Hufflepuff Captain Zacharias Smith – there’s Smith, Macavoy, and Summerby! Their Beaters, O’Flaherty and Rickett! Slytherin better watch out, because O’Flaherty’s temper on the pitch is legendary and she looks _mad_. Their Keeper Altin – the strongest Keeper in the league, absolutely nothing gets past him. And their Seeker, put your hands together for the Russian Fairy, Yuri Plisetsky!”

Yuri zooms past Jordan’s announcement box with his middle fingers up in salute, just because he can.

It’s a beautiful day in May and the adrenaline is kicking in. Hufflepuff yellow has always clashed horribly with Yuri’s hair, but today, Yuri can’t bring himself to care. There is a massive spill of canary yellow on the stands, and when Yuri and the other Hufflepuff players raise a fist in their direction, the crowd roars in approval.

 _I could get used to this,_ Yuri thinks wildly, basking in the general atmosphere of unrestrained excitement. The past week was full of escalating incidents of Slytherin intimidation but badgers bite back hard. The entire house closed ranks around the players and Yuri has never felt more untouchable than he has when safely cocooned in Hufflepuff’s protective embrace.

He brings his broom to a sharp stop, swinging to position to meet the Slytherin team. Right on cue, Lee Jordan opens his mouth.

“Aaaand now we have the Slytherin team! The Chasers – Pucey, Warrington, Malfoy! Malfoy appears to be growing out his hair; sorry Draco, only you’ll need at least one World Championship Cup to carry the silvery mane look – Where’s Nikiforov, show him how it’s done!”

Viktor, in the stands, looks delighted, and he obligingly sweeps off his hood and shakes his hair out like he’s in a goddamn shampoo commercial. Malfoy looks like he’s about to have a heart attack, and like his hair is already frizzing in indignation. Lee Jordan is _such_ a great commentator.

“Their Beaters, Crabbe and Goyle, let’s see if you can keep up with the Bludgers this match, boys. Their Keeper, Captain Graham Montague, I hope he has plays that are better than the ones that got Slytherin flattened against Ravenclaw! Aaaaaaaaaaaand we have Katsuki, he’d be the best player on the team if he doesn’t have a breakdown whenever the Bludgers get too close.”

And just like that, Yuri’s mood sours like raw milk.

He and Yuuri aren’t friends, not really. But since that night in the kitchens, when Yuri watched the phrase _I will not forget my place_ scar into the skin of Yuuri’s hand, when Yuuri admitted that he missed home and speaking Japanese and the “Vending machines, Yura, you could get anything you wanted at any time of the day without having to talk to anyone” – that day, Yuri offered to shelter Yuuri in the Hufflepuff common room and Yuuri had declined.

“Yura, I’d get into _more_ trouble if I get caught there than if I get caught in the dungeons this late.” He had said, and his voice was soft and warm and did weird stuff to Yuri’s insides.  Yuri had watched him go, the purposeful set to his shoulders restored and no longer breathing in the scary death rattle of a panic attack.

Yuri _knows_ that everyone gives the Slytherins shit because honestly, a lot of them are shit bags. It takes a lot to make up for the animosity that Malfoy attracts just by existing in anyone’s general vicinity, and it’s easy to look at a green tie and automatically think “Well, a total dickweed is coming in my direction, better put my dickishness in gear just in case.” But anxiety churns up in his stomach at the thought that knowingly or not, the entire school had never given a fair chance to people in Slytherin like Yuuri Katsuki – decent people who just had the bad luck to be sorted into the house for assholes.

Then Yuuri flies into position, and wow, Yuri can’t believe he was feeling sorry for this guy? Katsuki’s hair is slicked back, his eyes cold and focused behind his glasses. His robes are a bright emerald green, and the colour suits him so well. He looks earthy and alive and he looks like a painting in motion in the summer breeze, the green robes fluttering against the blue summer sky a contrast to the absolute stillness of his body, a tight, rigid control over flight that turns Yuri’s insides into jelly.

Yuri is thirteen but he knows stuff, okay, and the most important thing that he knows at this very moment is the fact that Katsuki is flaming hot right now, and Yuri is a flaming gay as a _direct result_ of that. He can’t control the faint blush on his cheeks, and when Katsuki makes eye contact and nods at him, a brief nod of friendly respect, Yuri can’t stop the blush from spreading everywhere, and he feels the heat go as far down as his chest.

Madam Hooch’s whistle is a shrill warning in the air, and the next whistle is a blessing to Yuri from the gods of puberty.

The whole pitch explodes into motion; just as expected, Malfoy makes a dive for possession. That’s his cue. Yuri takes a deep breath in the split-second before he dives right into Malfoy’s path at top speed, chasing after the ghost of gold -- or at least, that’s the narrative they’re trying to sell.

“This is a game of numbers,” Zacharias had told them last week, grim and determined. “We may have beaten Gryffindor last March, but they’re still in the lead in terms of points. They beat Slytherin by what, nearly two hundred points? Ravenclaw isn’t that far off from them, but the point difference isn’t entirely unsalvageable.”

The outlook is grim for Hufflepuff, but they’re not quitters, and they promised themselves they’d win this Cup for Cedric. And they have a plan.

“Maxine and I dissected Slytherin’s last two games, and they have two obvious weaknesses: they rely on Katsuki far more than they should and Malfoy is the worst Quaffle hog in all of history. If we’re going to score enough points to win the league, we need stop Katsuki from catching the Snitch too early in the game, and we need Malfoy to fuck up the Chasers.”

Yuri’s role is simple: “You’re basically the third Bludger, with Malfoy’s name on it.”

He kicks the Sokolinyy Razboynik into high gear and careens into Malfoy’s path at full speed.

“And the game kicks off with – did Plisetsky already see the Snitch? He dives right in the middle of field, blocking Malfoy to the Quaffle – and Macavoy takes possession! It looks like Plisetsky was just feinting, he’s pulled up and there no sign of the Snitch!”

There’s nothing technically wrong with the Seeker interfering with Chaser plays – so Yuri ruthlessly takes advantage of this. He hugs Malfoy’s trajectory as close as he can, and when he hears Malfoy curse behind him, he swings around and actually _sticks out his tongue_ at him. The crowd roars in approval, and Yuri deeply enjoys the rage coalescing on Malfoy’s features.

Macavoy scores. 10-0 to Hufflepuff, and when Warrington takes possession, Yuri cuts even closer, taking advantage of his superior agility to keep Malfoy in check. “Come off it, Plisetsky,” Malfoy roars, like Yuri gives a shit what he wants. In the background, Jordan is keeping up with the plays:

“It looks like Hufflepuff is playing an extremely defensive play – Smith hot on Warrington’s tail, Pucey choked off by Macavoy and Summerby – with Malfoy corralled into a corner by the Russian Fairy, is Warrington going to make it? He lines up a shot… ALTIN SAVES THE GOAL, Quaffle to Smith and the Hufflepuffs take possession once again!”

Malfoy tears off after Zacharias with a frustrated growl, but Yuri can’t be shaken off that easily. He flies as close and as aggravatingly as possible, cutting off Malfoy’s every attempt to get closer to the Quaffle. Lee Jordan is saying something into the speakers, something about how rare it is to see a Seeker playing this defensively, but Yuri didn’t care. It’s been nearly two months since the last Hufflepuff game, and in the time since then, Zacharias has been drilling only one lesson into his head: trust in your team.

He’s been keeping an eye out for the Snitch, but with half his attention on Malfoy, he’s not surprised when he hears the crowd’s sharp intake of breath and Jordan’s breathless commentary: “Katsuki spotted the Snitch! A sharp dive near the Ravenclaw stands, he’s close –”

Trust pays off. A Bludger flies across the pitch, courtesy of Maxine O’Flaherty, and forces Yuuri to swerve off-course, losing the Snitch in the process. A big groan from the Slytherin crowd and Yuri can barely contain his glee. The whole plan is coming together.

“So if I’m going after Malfoy, who’s going to watch for the Snitch?” Yuri had demanded, going over Zacharias’ diagrams with rapt attention. “What if Katsuki gets to the Snitch before I do? Game over.”

“That’s where Maxine and Tony come in. Their only assignment in the game is to keep Katsuki from the Snitch and keep the Bludgers away from us. But you’re still going to have to keep an eye out for the Snitch – we can’t let the game end until we have enough points to secure the league, but we can’t allow Slytherin the advantage of a hundred and fifty points either.”

And that’s their strategy: divide and delay. Malfoy still looks apoplectic whenever Yuri knocks him off-course, and even when he manages to wrest control of the Quaffle, his rage makes his aim shoddy and he misses the hoop by five feet. Heidi sweeps up the Quaffle, and a quick glance across the pitch tells Yuri that _the_ play is starting.

Across the pitch Heidi and Pucey are neck and neck – and whoopsy daisy, Heidi drops the Quaffle. Pucey looks dumbfounded at the windfall, the Slytherin goal posts right within reach, and Otabek _just_ on this side of not close enough to save the goal –

At the very last moment, Yuri pulls back, leaving Malfoy free for a pass and a beautiful shot through the hoops.

“Adrian!” Malfoy roars, throwing himself into the scoring area, and Pucey – He looks like a terrified bunny, caught between taking the opening and sticking to the play – he fumbles with the Quaffle in a half-aborted motion, and to the immediate derision of the Slytherin crowd, Pucey loses possession.

Yuri lets out a whoop, pauses, and streaks across the pitch in another feint. Yuuri follows, of course. He can’t help but follow, every Seeker trained to tail the other Seeker without the Snitch in their sights. Of course, Yuri’s not going anywhere, and he struggles to keep a straight face as he leads Yuuri straight into a collision course with Goyle.

Katsuki dodges; Goyle nearly falls off his broom.

The game is going beautifully, the plan is _brilliant,_  and Maxine and Zacharias may never orchestrate a Quidditch match as incredible as this.

“You need to look at the history,” Maxine had insisted back at the strategy meeting. “How much do you know of how Malfoy got on the Slytherin team?” At Yuri’s blank stare, she continued.

“He started playing on the Slytherin team about three years ago now, when Malfoy was in second year.” She grinned at him, smile sharp. “I was at their tryouts that year, me and Cedric – but Flint only held tryouts for Chaser and Beater. Guess what position Malfoy started out in?”

“Chaser?”

“Seeker,” Beka corrected grimly. “Malfoy started playing for Slytherin as Seeker.”

Maxine nodded at Beka. “Right. He started playing Seeker, but that year, there were no Seeker tryouts.” She paused. “That year, Malfoy’s father gave the entire Slytherin team Nimbus 2001s.”

Yuri’s mouth fell open. “He bought his way into the team?” He couldn’t quite believe it; despite all his dickishness, Yuri always felt like Malfoy’s flying was a point in his favour. Zacharias apparently agreed with him, because he moved to interrupt.

“Honestly speaking, he didn’t actually need to buy his way into the team. He’s the best Chaser Slytherin has, but if Malfoy has one drawback, it’s that he is most definitely a glory player. He wants people to watch him, to catch everyone’s attention and brag about their win. And to do that –”

“He needs to play Seeker,” Yuri finished.

Zacharias nodded. “He’s a good Chaser but a weak Seeker. At the time, the other Seekers were Cedric, Potter, and Chang – Malfoy stood a chance against Chang but Potter caught the Snitch from under his nose even with a rogue Bludger on his tail. Quidditch was cancelled that year because of the thing with the Chamber of Secrets, but he wouldn’t have stood a chance against Cedric either.”

“So how did Katsuki –”

“I’m getting to that. I think it was the year after when Flint switched Katsuki into rotation? I can’t remember the details exactly, but it was the same old – Malfoy was trying to win a pissing contest with Potter and got injured in Care of Magical Creatures. The game was coming up, and Flint was trying to wheedle out of playing Gryffindor first – it was a shit excuse, everyone knew he just didn’t want to play in a thunderstorm.

“We didn’t want to play unless they absolutely had _no_ substitutes at hand – we were fighting with Flint at the pitch at this point, the whole Hufflepuff team and the whole Slytherin team, Malfoy hanging at the back looking smug one second and pathetic the next – and what do you know. Katsuki jumps in, says he can sub for Malfoy.”

Zacharias had started to attract the general attention of the common room, even at seven in the morning, and a crowd was beginning to form. “So Katsuki plays Seeker – up until then he’d been the shy little wallflower Chaser who occasionally made brilliant plays, but nothing special. There was crazy rain that day, thunder and shit, practically zero visibility. And then the Dementors came.”

“Most of the players couldn’t handle it – I think the first to fall was Potter, and Professor Dumbledore had to catch him, but even before that all the other players were heading to the ground and fast. Katsuki though – he didn’t even notice that the Dementors had arrived, and before Hooch could call the match, he had already caught the Snitch, fair and square.”

They called it Operation: Enrage the Dragon. Keep Malfoy from possession, from the glory he desperately wanted, and hand that same glory on a platter to the other Chasers. Get him mad, and make him mad at his teammates – and the whole team will suffer. At the same time, stall Katsuki for as long as they can, and when they’ve scored a decent enough margin, Yuri needed to make the race for the Snitch as showy as he possibly can, all the better to distract Malfoy with.

Pucey goes first. Faced with a pass or a point, he drops the Quaffle instead, a truly pathetic turnover that has the Slytherins actually booing at their own player. Heidi very easily steals back the Quaffle and scores a goal; Yuri is actually cackling on the inside, but as he passes Warrington he plasters on an expression of absolute focus – can’t give the game up this early in the match.

Goyle slips up next; the near-collision with Katsuki nearly knocks him off his broom, and the Bludger intended for Katsuki finishes him off. Lee Jordan’s voice is just barely on the respectful side of gleeful when he reports: “And Montague has called for a Slytherin time-out – they’re one Beater down and the score is 40-0 just fifteen minutes into the game!”

The Slytherin team meets up by Montague at the hoops; Zacharias calls them over to the Hufflepuff stands. He gestures them closer, to huddle tighter, and when they’re a tight ring flying twenty feet above the nearest person, every single one of the _completely loses their shit_. They try to suppress it as much as they can, of course, but even Otabek has tears leaking out of his eyes.

“I can’t believe it’s working!” Zacharias chokes out, shoulders shaking dangerously and half-clinging to Jim for support. They all sneak a look at the Slytherin team across the pitch, and every single one of their players look upset. Montague is shouting invective against the Chasers, and Malfoy is the only one shouting back – Yuri can hear his voice shrieking all the way across the Quidditch pitch.

Zacharias has a hurried discussion with the Chasers about their defensive plays; for Otabek and Yuri he only said to keep up the good work. “And Yuri,” he adds, glancing at the scoreboard, “our target lead is a hundred and fifty points. Do as much as you can to delay the game – Maxine and Tony will still be helping you, of course – but if there’s no stopping Katsuki, we need to catch that Snitch. Alright?”

The Hufflepuff team breaks apart just as Hooch blows another shrill whistle to signal the end of the timeout – Malfoy is the first to break ranks in the Slyrherin team and he flies to center field, obviously agitated. His face is red and splotchy in anger. Yuuri is hot on his tail but pulls up to greater altitude; Yuri follows him up the air and feels a tiny smidge of concern. His shoulders are tense, just as expected from the grip he had on his broom, but the true indicator of Katsuki’s poor mood is the way his eyes are practically shooting fire at Malfoy, brow drawn right.

The last time Katsuki looked like that, he mouthed off at Umbridge at the Entrance Hall.

The game restarts; it goes as horribly for Slytherin as it has for the past half-hour. With Malfoy blocked off their offense is gutted, and when playing defensively the Slytherin Chasers barely have it in them to coordinate their actions. With Goyle out of the game and Crabbe playing the lonely Beater, Hufflepuff has clear control over the Bludgers, and poor Yuuri can barely catch a break for breath, much less to look for the Snitch.

Heidi scores, Zacharias scores, even Jim manages a shot when Montague’s too busy screaming at Crabbe to shape up. In contrast, only Pucey and Warrington have made goals for Slytherin. Hufflepuff is already a hundred points in the lead when Malfoy touches the Quaffle again.

“And Malfoy finally gets his hands on the Quaffle – he’s speeding across the pitch, he hasn’t scored a single goal for this whole match and he’s just aching for the glory – will he get past Altin? He’s dealing with Plisetsky and Summerby both, will any of his teammates assist? … He’s in the scoring area, Warrington and Pucey are still halfway across the pitch – Malfoy takes the shot – and it’s the first goal for Malfoy! The score is at 140-50!”

Yuri automatically moves to tail Malfoy again when he hears it – the gasp of the crowd that means the Snitch has been spotted. Yuuri’s in a steep dive at full-throttle – Yuri sees a flash of gold near the ground and makes a dive for it as well. Yuuri’s accelerating faster but Yuri is closer – they’re neck and neck now and Yuri can see his face now, scrunched up in desperation and tight with worry. It nearly stops Yuri in his tracks.

But Yuri sees a flash of yellow in the stands, remembers the bright yellow of Flitterbloom flowers and the bright yellow of the sweater Cedric Diggory died in, the yellow scarves and yellow ties of the people who believe in him, and soon, the only yellow he sees is the Golden Snitch finally in his grasp.

* * *

Hufflepuff wins 290-50, and Zacharias is sobbing into Heidi’s sleeve as they land. Yuri still has the Snitch in his fist and he’s only just begun to register the crowd roaring in his ears, feels the weak flutter of the Snitch’s wings against his palm, and when he finally snaps back to full alertness, it’s to the sight of Katsuki hovering in front of him with a rueful grin on his face.

“Congratulations!” he yells over the crowd. He holds his hand out for Yuri to shake and Yuri takes it in a daze. “Your team played a great game, it was a pleasure to play against you.”

Yuri barely gets out a “Yeah, you too,” before Malfoy is screeching to a halt beside them, already yelling in Katsuki’s face before they even have a chance to land.

“What the hell was that, Katsuki? You were supposed to catch the Snitch, and the _Russian Fairy_ beat you to it?”

“Hey, watch your goddamn mouth,” Yuri snarls. “Just because you played like absolute shit doesn’t mean you get to badmouth the only decent player on your team!”

Yuri’s temper spikes into rage when Malfoy leans back and actually sneers at him. “What’s this, you need thirteen year-olds to defend your honour? Or else you’ll run off and cry in the showers?”

Yuri tries to lunge at Malfoy and take a swing at his smirking face, but Yuuri’s arm shoots out and keeps him at bay. His forearm is firm and powerful, a solid bar against Yuri’s chest, and somewhere in the back of his brain, beneath all the rage and elation, a part of Yuri stupidly thinks _Oh. He must work out._

“Leave it, Yura,” Yuuri says sharply. “It’s not worth the fight.” Instead, he pushes down on Yuri’s broom, forces him into a slow descent to the ground. If he was hoping that it’ll make Malfoy leave them alone, tough luck; assholes follow you wherever you go and Malfoy is no exception.

“Oh, so it’s Yura now, is it? Maybe that’s why you didn’t get the Snitch in time; Hufflepuff losers must be rubbing off on you. I really can’t believe you made it on the team at all! Imagine, a Slytherin so pathetic he needs to look for friends from the _Hufflepuffs._ ”

Yuri and Yuuri ignore him and land neatly on the ground; Yuuri deliberately turns his back on his own teammate and quickens his pace, depositing Yuri with the other Hufflepuff players before Malfoy could say another word. Malfoy lands in an ungraceful heap next to Crabbe. The captains are standing by Madam Hooch at the centre of the pitch, Zacharias looking overjoyed and overwhelmed and Montague looking murderous. When he sees Yuuri and Malfoy his expression just sours further.

“Alright boys, a friendly handshake with the opposing team for the commemorative photo,” Madam Hooch commands imperiously, gesturing for Colin Creevey to come closer.

In the shot that will eventually be printed out and distributed, the entire Hufflepuff team will be smug with self-satisfaction and flushed with exhilaration. The entire Slytherin team will be radiating hostility and resentment – Montague will be attempting to crush Zacharias’ hand, Malfoy will be refusing to even touch Heidi, and Goyle is entirely absent, still lying unconscious in the med tent.

The only players who look halfway into anything resembling sportsmanship will be the Seekers – Yuri and Yuuri clasping hands, steel in their spines and respect in their eyes despite the look of livid hatred Malfoy will be sending in Yuuri’s direction.

They break apart from the practiced pose of neutrality only when Creevey is satisfied with his photographs, and Yuri automatically turns to Beka, caught between rhapsodizing about the day’s win and gossiping about Malfoy’s arrogant shit-talking. But in the end Yuri doesn’t need to say anything, because Malfoy’s voice is clear as day over the roar of the crowd when he tells Montague: “I don’t think the Slytherin team should be a host to parasites who have nothing to contribute to the whole. I think that we’re going to have to call a spade a spade and cut our losses on investments with no returns.”

Yuri looks over his shoulder just in time to see Malfoy shoot Yuuri a look of triumphant venom. Yuuri, on the other hand, looks like he’s just about shaking with rage.

“Katsuki, my father bought you a Nimbus 2001 and a thirteen year-old on some old piece of Russian trash is _still_ outflying you? I didn’t spend all that money just to lose, you know.”

Beka has to bodily restrain Yuri at that. The Sokolinyy Razboynik is a fucking work of art; Lilia Baranovskaya made it with her own bare hands, and a mass-produced Nimbus 2001 has nothing on a Baranovskaya broom. Even the Russian team’s Firebolts has to go through Lilia for fine-tuning, and every team in Eastern Europe is desperate to get her to customize their brooms. Some random kid from Britain who doesn’t know shit shouldn’t be running his mouth about her, because even if she is a hag she makes damn fine brooms and –

“You’re not a Gryffindor,” Beka hisses in his ear, jerking him back into the circle of the Hufflepuff team and shoving him into Maxine’s arms. “Don’t forget what happened to Potter and the Weasleys.”

Zacharias is glancing uneasily into the crowd, probably looking for Umbridge; Heidi just gives Yuri a quelling look when he opens his mouth to argue with Otabek. Hooch is too far away now to break up any fights if they occur – she’s checking on Goyle at the first aid tent and wouldn’t be able to hear a thing. Montague, as always, is absolutely useless.

Instead of defusing the situation between his two players, he sides with Malfoy, patron saint of rich kids and their hangers-on. “I told you to catch the Snitch in the first fifteen minutes of the game, Katsuki! What the hell was that?”

If Montague expected that little speech to help him save face as Quidditch captain, then he’s going to be disappointed; Yuuri ignores him altogether and instead lasers onto Malfoy, brown eyes flinty and a hint of a sneer in the corners of his lips. “So you think I was the humiliation in this match?” he asks, disbelieving. “Yura may have beaten me to the Snitch, but I wasn’t the star Chaser kept out of play by a Seeker on an ‘old piece of Russian trash.’ If you’re looking for an embarrassment to the entire house, you don’t need to look further than yourself.”  

He looks down at the Nimbus 2001 in his fist and his scowl deepens. “If you wanted this broom back you should have said so. Not flying at all is better than having to play on the same team as you.”

Everybody’s jaw drops when Yuuri forcefully thrusts his broomstick at Malfoy’s chest. “You can have it back. I’m done.”

* * *

Tensions ran high in the Great Hall for dinner. Yuri heard that Seamus Finnigan had opened a betting pool on whether Yuuri was showing up to dinner; he had marched up to the Gryffindor in the middle of the entrance hall and dumped ten Galleons in front of Finnigan.

“He’ll be there,” Yuri snarled.

Now, though, he’s less certain. Quidditch matches were always followed by a small feast for dinner, to sate teenage appetites worked up by sports and violence. House parties came after, something that technically wasn’t supposed to happen but most teachers found it harmless enough. Zacharias is already talking about a bottle of Firewhiskey he had managed to smuggle into the castle; most of the team making plans to escape into the greenhouses and get shitfaced in the hallucinogen greenhouse. But not Yuri.

Yuri’s watching the great double doors at the end of the Great Hall. Dinner was served fifteen minutes ago and Yuuri still hasn’t shown up. His usual end of the Slytherin table is emptier than usual, as if all the cowards at the table inched as far as they can away from some sort of Siege Perilous of Shame, all because fucking Draco Malfoy threw a hissy fit on the pitch.

“He’s well within his rights not to show,” Otabek says next to him calmly.

“He’s not going to let Malfoy run him out of table like that, he’s got more spine than everyone thinks,” Yuri insists. “Remember Umbridge?”

“It was a gutsy move,” Otabek allows, but then he narrows his eyes at Yuri. “But don’t you realize that Katsuki’s got nowhere and no one to have dinner with? I don’t blame him for wanting his own company tonight.”

Yuri hates it when Beka makes sense.

“Why are you so hung up on Katsuki, anyway?”

Now Yuri straight up wants to murder him. “I’m not hung up on him, what the fuck?”

“Then why are you always looking for him? You don’t see me stalking Ron Weasley.”

“It’s not stalking!” Yuri grits his teeth, frustrated. It’s not like he can tell Beka about meeting Katsuki in the corridor with a mutilated hand, and he _definitely_ can’t tell him about the fact that Yuuri is a Muggle-born. But if he doesn’t --

“Then why do you act like you’re already friends?” Beka’s eyes drill holes through Yuri, pinning him down like a butterfly spread out for observation. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

Yuri is frozen to his seat, heart pounding. Beka is a quiet friend, a steady friend; but sometimes, he gets moments of intensity that leave you feeling off-kilter. Right now is one of them, the palpable feeling of magic electric between them and almost compelling Yuri to blurt out secrets that aren’t his.

But then a frisson of excitement breaks through the dinner crowd; somebody pushes through the double doors in bright emerald robes, still muddied and still kitted out in full Quidditch leathers.

It’s Katsuki.

Yuri whips his head back at Beka and smirks. “I told you he’d show up!” Beka barely inclines his head in response, eyes fixed upon Katsuki, but the corners of his mouth lift the barest fraction of an inch and Yuri is satisfied.

“Of course Katsuki would be here, he might be in Slytherin but he’s no --” Yuri’s voice trails off as he watches the discomfort straddling Yuuri’s shoulders, bearing down on the graceful lines of his body until something very much like defeat starts showing through. When he sits at his place on the Slytherin table he might as well have sagged onto the table; Yuuri’s head bows forward and two tables away Yuri can detect the tremble that runs through his body.

“Fuck,” he breathes quietly.

“It can’t be easy knowing that your entire house hates you,” Beka muses. “He cost them the match and Malfoy won’t let up on him; that’s got to have cronies like Parkinson, Crabbe and Goyle after his throat.”

Knowledge eats at Yuri’s insides. It’s not just that he cost them a match. Slytherin is a snake pit, but for Yuuri Katsuki, it’s the lion’s den, and Yuri still faintly remembers the story of Daniel. But there is no god to protect Yuuri from the roommates who want his kind dead; Malfoy’s aunt Bellatrix Lestrange had murdered people for offenses less than a blue plastic watch.

Yuri’s eyes slide over to Malfoy, watches him sneer in Yuuri’s direction, and he makes up his mind in a tenth of a second. It’s the right thing to do.

He marches across the Great Hall, across the enormous aisle bisecting the chamber, past the Ravenclaw table, and all the way to the end of the Slytherin table.

Yuuri doesn’t see him coming. He’s too busy slumped over a bowl of rice topped with egg, and he doesn’t even look up when Yuri comes to a halt in front of him.

“What are you eating?”

It slips out of Yuri’s mouth sounding rough and uncaring, and inwardly, he winces. But when Yuuri blinks up at him in shock, he struggles to keep a straight face and makes a show of impatience. “You always get Japanese food after Quidditch. What’s that you’re eating?”

There’s a second bowl of the dish across the table from Katsuki, and Yuri’s heart tightens at the thought of Slinky still hoping after all these years that Yuuri would make a friend.

“It’s called katsudon,” Yuuri says slowly. “It’s a deep-fried pork cutlet with egg and onions.”

“Sounds good. Why aren’t you eating it.”

Yuuri looks startled at the demand, and when his eyes fill up with tears Yuri couldn’t help but feel like an enormous jackass. “Um,” Yuuri says thickly, desperately trying to hold the tears back. “They’re traditionally for celebrating victory, you see -- ‘katsu’ means to win, and it’s called…” He makes a sad little laugh. “Anyway, I’m not eating it because --”

He gestures towards his muddy robes. “I don’t think I should be eating victory meals, don’t you think?” Katsuki had clearly aimed for light levity, but all he succeeds in doing is sour Yuri’s mood further.

“Well, I won that game,” he said brusquely. “Does that mean I’m entitled to this katsu-whatever?”

Katsuki looks panicked now. “I, uh -- Sure? I guess?”

“Good.” Yuri glares at Yuuri one last time before he sweeps back his robes and plants his Hufflepuff ass very firmly on the Slytherin table bench. He ignores the wave of shock that ripples through the room, the epicenter right on Katsuki’s face. “If this is my victory katsu-whatever I can do whatever the fuck I want with it. Stop looking like someone murdered your dog.”

He takes the second bowl of katsudon, runs a spoon neatly down middle, and dumps half of it on to a plate. “Here. I’m sharing mine with you.”

Yuri resolutely digs in, not looking at Yuuri's face.

A few moments later, Yuuri picks up his chopsticks and begins to eat. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I MOTHERFUCKING HATE QUIDDITCH NOW UGH IT WAS SO HARD TO WRITE 
> 
> Sokolinyy Razboynik -- Falcon Rogue. Basically a sneaky reference to both the Millenium Falcon and Rogue One :joy: also, a reference to a Russian folk tale of the Nightingale Rogue, a very Robin-Hood type who comes and goes with the wind (or sth? It's 2 AM and my memory is shot to hell :joy:) THANKS SO MUCH TO LIN AND SEB FOR HELPING ME COME UP WITH THE NAME

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: 
> 
> Deda -- familiar form of Dedushka, which his grandfather  
> Rastishka -- a Russian brand of yogurt whose brand name is a pun on growth
> 
> EDIT 6/21/2017  
> There are some minor edits to the timeline -- I had to look up the Hogwarts Quidditch season, and as this takes place after shortly after Trelawney is sacked, the only remaining matches are Hufflepuff-Slytherin and Gryffindor-Ravenclaw. 
> 
> U kno what that means. :smirk:


End file.
